Real Time Location Systems (RTLSs) track objects, typically by associated tags. For individuals, a badge is used for tracking in environments such as health-care facilities, warehouses, and other areas where location is important. Personnel badges and asset tags may include Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) (passive or active), and communicate with fixed or hand-held readers.
While known tags and communication standards such as Wi-Fi (802.11) may hold the potential for full-scale deployment—tracking many objects in real-time—in reality, they fall short. For example, accuracy is impaired by an inability to overcome multipath effects of the tracking environment. Time delays from processing bottlenecks result when realistic quantities of objects are tracked. This leads to stale, inaccurate, object location indications and even loss of tracking.
What is needed are systems to monitor the location of people and items in real-time that scale with the requirements of the application.